The Glass Wall: Success strategies for women at work – and businesses that mean business

By Sue Unerman and Kathryn Jacob

Never mind the glass ceiling. In the workplace today there's a glass wall. Men and women can see each other clearly through the divide, but they don't speak the same language or have the same expectations. And as a result, women and their careers are suffering.

With more women than ever in the workforce, but still too few in the boardroom, now is the time to address the assumptions and miscommunication holding women back. This book gives women the tools they need to master any situation. Drawing on Unerman and Jacob's own experience in male-dominated businesses, as well as over a hundred interviews with both men and women, The Glass Wall provides clear, smart and easy-to apply strategies for success. From unlocking ambition and developing resilience to nurturing creativity and getting noticed, these are the skills that everyone needs to learn to help break down that wall and create better workplaces for all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781782832805

Sue Unerman

Sue Unerman is the Chief Strategic Officer at MediaCom. She is also a Council Member of the Open University, sits on the University of Oxford Public Affairs Advisory Group, was on the Advisory Board of the Government Digital Service and is on the Corporate Development Board of Women's Aid.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THE WAY FORWARD

Do you have the career you want?

Have you achieved all of your ambitions? When you look at the senior management in your company, are there as many women at the top as there are men? And the very top job, is it usually held by a woman?

It would be no surprise if you answered no to at least one of these questions. It wouldn’t be a surprise at all if the answer to all of these questions was no.

A major report into the proportion of women on boards was published in late 2015. The Davies Report examined the approach to increase representation of women on boards in the UK and around the world. The UK is doing better than it used to. Appointments of women at board level to FTSE 100 companies have reached a new high at over a quarter: now 26 per cent are women. Look down a level, and the FTSE 250 has a proportion of just under 20 per cent. The report’s author, Lord Davies, a former banker in his sixties, is delighted at this progress. New targets are being set for a third of directors to be women by 2020.

The last time we looked women made up more than 50 per cent of the population.

The proportion of women on boards is evidently rising. Yet most of the women on boards in the statistics are in non-executive, part-time positions. There are only 26 executive women directors on FTSE 100 boards – that’s just 9.6 per cent.

This does not indicate a pipeline for executive women on boards. Nor does it show that there is a level playing field for women to get promoted, and to achieve the careers that they deserve.

Women in work in the UK – and there are 14.5 million of them – are still not getting the same opportunities to reach the top as men.

Outside the UK, the Davies Report shows a similar picture. Norway, where a quota system has been adopted, has the most women on boards, at 35 per cent. Denmark and Germany have just over one-fifth. Then numbers dwindle. The USA has 16.9 per cent, Australia 16.2 per cent, Ireland 12.7 per cent and India 12.1 per cent.

Again, let us remind ourselves, in countries where women have always made up at least half of the population.

Not everyone in work wants to be managing director or CEO. And not every woman wants to be managing director, CEO or in any senior role. But if they do want to, then they should have the same chance to do so as men. With such large proportions of women in the workforce overall, so many millions, it is really difficult to believe that so many of them lack the ambition or ability to reach senior levels of management.

Women are not a minority in any respect, apart from in the boardroom. What is really going on, and, more to the point, what can we do about it?

We wrote this book because there is a secret that no one wants to admit.

Thousands of words have been written, numerous courses have been run.

In workplaces across the world the recurring questions of ‘Why did that happen?’, ‘Is it just me?’ and ‘Does that seem fair?’ play in the minds of women of all ages and roles.

The fact is that there isn’t any fairness in the way that the workplace functions for women, and this book contains tips, tactics and strategies that will help you get the career you deserve. Not necessarily to get you to the top of organisations – because lots of women don’t see that as the path they want to follow. This book is aimed at getting you a career that you enjoy, with the seniority you deserve, and in which your contribution is recognised.

We also know that there are men in the workplace who want the tools to make this contribution possible. They see the talent pool around them, and they see the individuals that can help the organisation thrive. Their difficulty is in being able to understand what is going on and how they can contribute to making it better, and in ensuring that they are part of making long-lasting changes that create permanent shifts in the workplace.

The workplace isn’t the only part of society where women have failed to play a full part. In the UK, women have been able to stand for Parliament since 1918. It was only in 1997 that the number of female MPs reached double figures. To date there have only ever, in total, been 450 women MPs, a figure below the number of men elected in 2015 alone (459). Worldwide, there are only forty-four countries where the representation of women stands at 30 per cent or more. In Germany, a country led by one of the world’s most powerful women, the percentage of female representation is 31 per cent.

So it isn’t just your problem.

When we began our careers, in the 1980s, there was a good deal of talk about the glass ceiling and the fact that it was now shattered. There was a woman prime minister in the UK. Equality for women in the workforce was a legal fact, ever since the gender equality act in 1970. There were a few women bosses around, and there were sure to be more of them as they came through the system.

Although most bosses were middle-aged men in suits, it was clear that the future for women bosses was bright. A new dawn was on the way, a future where you would expect half of the management of every company to be women, and that every other CEO would occasionally wear a skirt to work.

Three decades later, there really hasn’t been very much change. Despite developments in social norms and legislation around gender discrimination, better conditions for working mothers and increased access to higher education for women in a broader range of subjects, there is no radical change in the make-up of who is running most businesses, especially at an executive full-time level. It is still men. There may be some women around board tables, but most companies continue to be predominantly managed by men.

There are more and more women in the workforce. At entry level women are doing well now, making up half or more of many industries’ workforces, and this looks set to increase as women are graduating, on average, at a higher level than men. Yet year after year the statistics show that the vast majority of senior executive management are men.

Does this gender imbalance matter?

Well, it should matter – and to business in general, as well as to the women concerned. Statistics show that while tokenism (i.e., just employing one or two senior women) doesn’t work, companies who have several women in senior management improve their profitability and overall performance. More women on the board means improved returns.

In research published by the Financial Times from the 2013 annual report of the Swedish Corporate Governance Board, Karin Thorburn – who has also taught at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business – says several studies show there is a positive relationship between the proportion of female board members and sales growth: ‘A board does itself a disservice by being too homogeneous.’ While company profitability cannot be guaranteed by merely adding more women on boards, Professor Thorburn provides examples from Australia, Spain, Singapore and Israel that show this action leads to improved company performance, such as increased shareholder value, more MBA graduates on boards, better attendance at meetings and more diverse skill sets, with board members actively seeking more information and taking an initiative. Furthermore the study indicates that firms perform better with a higher fraction of female board members, and indeed US evidence suggests that gender-balanced boards may be more efficient monitors of the CEO. A look at the Australian stock market’s reaction to new outside directors shows that investors value the appointment of new female directors more than that of male directors. The stock price reaction is significantly higher (approximately 2 per cent) on the announcement of a woman. Similar results exist for Spain and Singapore.

Another paper from the research organisation Catalyst shows that firms with three or more female directors had a better profit margin than the average company by more than 40 per cent. Even a more cautious study in 2013 by Thomson Reuters, ‘Mining the Metrics of Board Diversity’, shows that, on average, companies with mixed-gender boards have marginally better performance when compared with a benchmark index, and less volatility in their financial results. In addition, analysis carried out across sectors also shows that companies with mixed boards have lower tracking of errors. The authors, André Chanavat and Katharine Ramsden, point to a potential competitive advantage in mixed-gender boards versus alpha-male homogeneity asking, ‘Might greater gender diversity increase the performance gap between companies that do versus ones that do not?’

McKinsey Global Institute’s 2015 report ‘The Power of Parity’ states: ‘Gender inequality is not only a pressing moral and social issue but also a critical economic challenge. If women – who account for half the world’s working-age population – do not achieve their full economic potential, the global economy will suffer.’ They have worked out the upside of equality. In total, if every country just matches the rate of improvement of the fastest-improving country in their region, this could add as much as $12 trillion to the global economy by 2025. If every country achieved gender equality by 2025, this would rise to $28 trillion.

Too many businesses are still losing a pipeline of talented women. Solving this properly matters to the bottom line.

Do women want to reach the top?

A McKinsey report from 2012, ‘Unlocking the Full Potential of Women at Work’, concludes that ‘Helping talented women develop and advance promises significant economic benefit to companies.’ However, it also adds: ‘But too many women don’t want to reach the top […] only 41% of the 200 successful women we interviewed declared an aspiration to join the C-suite.’

Do women really not want to reach the top? Since we’re talking about half of this country’s population, surely even if a smaller proportion of women than men have such ambitions, there are still enough women aiming for the top. Are women conflicted about the work/life balance when they have children? Yes, of course. But, as this book will show, this is an issue that can be examined and addressed. Our own experiences prove that it’s not an insurmountable barrier, and that it’s possible to start a family while maintaining a high-level career.

Indeed, KPMG’s 2014 report ‘Cracking the Code’ included statistics showing that women with children are more likely to have received five or more promotions than women without children – although both groups of women were much less likely to have been promoted than men in equivalent positions.

It is clear to us that with even a 1 per cent advantage for business resulting from a more balanced senior management team – and the vast majority of evidence suggests that there’s far more to gain than that – companies must rise to the challenge of promoting their valuable women employees, and of not losing them if they become new mums.

Our interviews for this book show that far too few companies take this view, hiding behind inappropriate notions of ‘level playing fields’ at what must be considerable long-term value and cultural loss.

Remember, the glass ceiling was supposedly shattered over forty years ago. Legislation ensured that it was dismantled. Worldwide the law varies, although most countries now, at least, penalise or prevent the dismissal of pregnant women. Still not every country mandates equal pay for equal work. Across the EU maternity leave is diverse, ranging from twelve weeks to fifty-eight weeks, and paternity leave varies massively. The detail of legal gender equality varies from Australia to Austria and beyond. The truth is clear in most countries. Even where the legal glass ceiling is gone, most women at work, at one time or another, will come up against a block to their careers that men with a similar level of talent know how to overcome. Do men know something, then, that women don’t?

Yes actually they do. We will explain and decode it in these pages.

Every woman is entitled to achieve her full potential at work and, at the same time, a good work/life balance. There are millions at the moment who are not.

Even where there is no glass ceiling …

there is instead a glass divide, a glass wall.

You can see through it, to the meetings that you’re excluded from or the casual conversations that accelerate careers that you aren’t participating in. Men and women can see each other very clearly through the glass, but they don’t speak the same language or have equivalent cultural expectations. For some women a glass wall appears where there has been nothing there before because of a change of management or role. One of our interviewees described the challenge that came about when she got a new boss. Although he had lived in America, her home country, for over a decade, and was to all intents and purposes an American, she discovered that he’d been brought up in a society in another part of the world, where he had formed an expectation for a level of deference from women in general that she had never experienced. Once she got over her surprise and dismay, we find how she dealt with this in the book. For other women it is so customary, so habitual, to be the wrong side of a glass wall that they don’t even try to break through.

The glass wall has several aspects. Some are to do with the culture of the company you’re working in: it might not have a tradition of senior women, or it might be just too homogeneous (for example, the board are all white middle-aged men in suits) to allow outliers (and being a women might make you an outlier in this respect) to progress. There are walls built from managers’ nervousness around maternity leave (whatever the official company policy) or inability to understand that not everyone laughs at the same jokes or behaves as if they’re in a boys’ locker room.

Then there are the walls that result from how women are brought up, really from our culture. The way we are expected to behave by schools, by our friends, perhaps by our parents. These walls block women and not men; men just don’t have these walls in the same way. (They may experience other ones, built from society’s expectations from them, but that is another book, not this one.) If you haven’t spotted the wall yet or don’t know where the wall comes from, you will have trouble getting rid of it, so this is the time to be very clear about it.

The glass walls that come about from cultural expectations are deep-rooted and have lasted for a very long time. The US career consultant Janice Larouche, writing back in the 1980s, described the tendency for some women to come up against blocks that are derived from a notion of femininity that’s deep-rooted in most cultures. This, then, is where some of the walls come from, and because our cultures change at a very slow pace, the issues she mentioned back then are still around, even if the strategies, language and tactics to deal with them must be updated and made contemporary.

As part of the background to the book, we commissioned research across three countries to assess what men and women felt about their careers. The majority of those surveyed in the UK, Russia and the USA felt that women encountered barriers to their careers. So we know there is an issue and we’ve recognised it. No secret there. There’s more about this illuminating Lightspeed research in the appendix at the back of the book. A clear finding is that a greater percentage of men than women say that they are very ambitious. It seems that women are ambiguous about the word ‘ambition’. It feels strident and harsh, at odds with our sense of self as women. Societally, does that indicate that we see ambition as the preserve of men? Is there a glass wall in the fact that females are unwilling to articulate their ambition so that career fulfilment is unattainable? Within the pages that follow you will find advice that doesn’t require you, as a woman, to become a ‘man’ in order to thrive at work. There is another way that enables you to stay true to your sense of self and not be forced into the roles that make you uncomfortable. You will find challenging advice as you follow your path through the book, but none of it will require you to role-play for the rest of your career.

This ambivalence around ambition is one of the most common glass walls in the office. Women can be less single-minded than men sometimes about what they might have to sacrifice for the next promotion. Rather than this being a reason for standing still or moving sideways, it could be that women just need helping through that version of the glass wall. That does not make them less able for a senior role: in fact, it might even make them better at it, as they seek improvements in how things are run beyond the pursuit of power and status.

If acknowledging your ambition is your glass wall, we’re providing detailed advice of how to get past it here.

Being too open is another aspect of the glass wall. Often young women enter the workplace wanting to be true to themselves, and to stay in touch with their feelings. This authenticity is absolutely crucial to a great career, but so is knowing when to deploy it and when to disguise it. You have to be aware that every word you say in any workplace setting (including the bar across the road) is taken literally and might get used against you. Sometimes you need to be measured in how you react in the moment.

It should be enough to be very good at the task elements of the job, shouldn’t it? Well, yes and no. Another common glass wall for women is believing that getting work done as efficiently as possible is enough to build a career. Getting stuff done is an incredible asset professionally. It is not enough, however. You will not get promoted to a senior management position solely because you are highly efficient.

There‘s the putting-yourself-down glass wall. Women are often quick to take the blame for something going wrong, and famously tend to recite their flaws rather than their talents. If you are negative about yourself in the wrong context, however attractively modest this may seem, then your detractors will repeat it and use it against you.

There are many more aspects of the glass wall detailed in these pages: perfectionism – time-consuming self-editing, which is ultimately self-defeating when others are being promoted for a good enough job done; the work/family delusion – your boss is not your dad, your team are not your siblings (or your kids); desire for security – settling for a safe, more junior role instead of shooting for the stars; needing to be liked – never wanting to have to make an unpopular call; not wanting to fight – being compliant is not what you get paid for in a senior role.

Is it right or fair that this should hold women back? Maybe not. But that does not change a thing. What women need is to see the glass wall when they come up against it, to know what to do about it, and to go against some of what society expects in order to break through the wall and then make a difference to how business currently operates. More women in senior positions will change workplace culture.

This book gives you practical techniques to smash the glass walls and to take the senior position that you have earned.

This book contains the advice that no one ever gives you in training sessions or coaching. It’s practical and applicable, and the advice works.

In the chapters that follow we’ll explain our strategies for success, and ways to avoid the pitfalls of failure. Our purpose is not only to arm women with strategies to help them stay on their desired career path, but also to open up and explain the mainly hidden gender politics that are in operation. We will reveal the glass walls and show you what to do about them to make real changes to the current, highly unsatisfactory, status quo.

The case studies you will read are all based on fact (although most identities are disguised at the request of many of our interviewees). Many will be shared experiences, things perhaps that you have gone through where you have felt alone in a situation that in fact is common to many of us. If you take the advice and try the strategies out, you will find that they will change things at work. The advice is practical and, while sometimes counter-intuitive or even against what is thought of as common wisdom, it is tried and tested and it will work. What you will read may sometimes surprise you. It may even shock you. But that is what is needed now. The glass wall will not disappear by itself. It has been standing there, blocking the progress of women at work for decades. Together we need to take it down, and that will not happen if we are too earnest or euphemistic. We need to face up to the situation and make real change happen.

Our opening chapter concerns ambition. Time and time again, as discussed, it appears that where men are openly ambitious, women are ambivalent, not sure if a senior position will suit them. Unclear whether they want to behave in the way that they think they need to in order to achieve their goals at work. Well, sometimes you need to steel yourself to do so, but sometimes you don’t. We will show how you can be yourself by being clear about what you want and what you don’t want. How you can change any role to suit your own personal style.

Another common theme is that men show off